Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  In character classes with Igor Belsky, who, as a performer, had been one of Russia’s most dynamic exponents of the genre, Rudolf was also attempting to break barriers.

  Often pupils think that national dancing takes second place to ballet, but I had the impression that Rudolf really wanted to learn. It was very important for him. He was trying to bring folk dance closer to pure classical form. For example, a tendu in character dancing doesn’t have to be turned out, but Rudolf was really forcing his turnout. In Spanish classes while everyone else did a pas de chat that was half measure, Rudolf did his full out. He was maximalist: that’s why often he could be aggressive with people—he was afraid to lose time.

  Even Pushkin, who made a point of steering his students early in their careers in one direction or another—“this one toward the romantic-lyrical route, that one toward the virtuoso”—found himself nonplussed by Rudolf’s cross-pollination of styles. “He used to say, ‘I don’t know who the devil you are! Are you a character dancer? A classical dancer? Or a Romantic dancer?’ It was because I was good at all of that.” But Pushkin gave him freedom, freedom not only to mold himself but to choose the roles he wanted to study. The teacher had encouraged Rudolf to stay on at school for another year in order to consolidate the progress he had made, the result of which amazed colleagues who had graduated before him. One of those, Anatoly Nikiforov, remembers:

  He changed so much in 1958. He got three times more from Pushkin’s coaching than he had in all the previous years. When I saw Alexander Ivanovich in Rossi Street one day I congratulated him for doing such a great job with Rudolf, and he replied, “He’s a talent!” which was very unusual. He hardly ever praised people.

  Rudolf himself knew his worth by now. At a 1958 New Year’s Eve party attended by Pushkin, Vera Kostrovitskaya, and many of the students, he made a toast in honor of a girl who had failed to get into the Kirov but won a place in a small company in Siberia. “Raising his glass to Inna Skidelskaya, he said, ‘Here’s to getting Inna away from Novosibirsk,’ and turning to her mother, he added, ‘You have my promise that I’ll help to get her back.’ ‘How do you expect to do that?’ smiled Inna’s mother. ‘Just you wait,’ Rudolf told her. ‘Soon the whole world is going to know about me!’ ”

  In February, March, and April that year, Rudolf danced the male lead in student performances of the great classical ballets—the first he had given in full costume and in front of an audience on the Kirov stage. Sergiu Stefanschi still remembers his Nutcracker solo:

  It was technically strong and already you could see the difference between him and the Kirov dancers. Rudolf didn’t have the control of the upper body Soloviev had, and the way he moved his hands, his head, and his torso was not so well-trained, but he had much more freedom than the others and he covered more space. He flew!

  It was this extraordinary unconfined quality that stunned a Moscow audience in April during a national ballet-school contest—one of the most impressive gatherings of young talent in the history of twentieth-century dance. Other performers included the Bolshoi school’s star pupils Vladimir Vasiliev and Ekaterina Maximova; Leningrad’s Yuri Soloviev partnering the eighteen-year-old Natalia Makarova. Rudolf appeared with Alla Sizova, stealing the show on the second night with their duet from Le Corsaire (which they immediately repeated as an encore). Pale, composed Sizova—a paradigm of Kirov clarity—was the perfect foil to the blazing Nureyev. As a film of a subsequent performance in Moscow records, Rudolf’s technique and placing at that time were very crude. “Bursting out of proper form,” as one critic put it, his arms and feet flap, his shoulders are raised, but those who saw him for themselves insist that the camera caught nothing of his power onstage, nor conveyed the wild pleasure that dancing gave him.

  Even Vasiliev was dazzled. Also one of a new breed of Soviet males determined to transcend the role of partner and explore ways of synthesizing different dance genres, he was an amazing virtuoso, accustomed to executing at least a dozen pirouettes at a time. That night he watched the Leningrad contender making only a few revolutions as he turned (Rudolf, as Baryshnikov puts it, “was never a multiple pirouette man like Vasiliev or Soloviev”), but it was the position of his feet in relevé that held Vasiliev transfixed. “I thought, God! This guy is really dancing on pointe. It was so beautiful.” From then on Vasiliev began sacrificing the number of turns executed on a low demi-pointe and copying Rudolf’s high relevé: “It was a totally different aesthetic: more beautiful and cleaner.” Not having an ideal premier danseur physique himself, he noticed how the position of Rudolf’s feet had given a more streamlined look to his legs. “It helped Vasiliev tremendously,” said Baryshnikov. “It stretched him—because of Rudolf, and nobody else.”

  As a result of Rudolf’s success, the Bolshoi immediately offered him a contract as a soloist, allowing him to bypass the traditional first rung of corps de ballet. Moscow’s second company, the Stanislavsky, went one better by promising to make him a premier danseur, but its provincial standards and heavy touring schedule offered no temptation. Besides, there were still two months before his graduation in Leningrad, and he wanted to see what the Kirov had in store for him. “So I patiently went back. Completed studies.”

  In many ways Rudolf was better suited at that time to the Bolshoi’s broad bravado style, which has always lacked the Kirov’s refinement. (If the Leningrad school is reflected in the architectural precision and harmony of its city, the Bolshoi has similarly absorbed the characteristics of clamorous, exciting, haphazard Moscow.) “In Moscow they did not teach the same way,” Balanchine has written. “They had more running around on the stage naked, like show-offs, flexing their muscles. In Moscow there was much more acrobatics. Not the Imperial style at all. And that made sense—after all, the czar lived in our city. Petersburg is Versailles.” Alexandra Danilova concurred. “Moscow style—well, they always sort of seek the gallery approval. I think the Leningrad style is much more dignified. They just dance. There is no playing with the public. There is good taste.… Something very royal about Leningrad dancer. Quietness and royalty.”

  On the other hand, the Bolshoi still had the legendary Galina Ulanova (Prokofiev’s inspiration for Romeo and Juliet), who was, in Rudolf’s view “the first ballerina of the world,” combining the finesse and lyricism of her Kirov training with a Stanislavskian understanding of the internal meaning of her roles. But she was exceptional. Totally immersed in her performance—the personification of the Russian soul—Ulanova, he felt, was “perennially uncorrupted,” whereas lesser dancers had succumbed to the company’s status as a national tourist attraction. “At school we couldn’t help feeling a sense of superiority at the sophistication of the Kirov dancers,” remarked Sergiu Stefanschi. “ ‘Look how they move! Look how they do mime!’ Rudolf said to me once, ‘Not making a big noise.’ ” Even the Moscow balletomanes were less educated and easier to please than their Leningrad counterparts. Rudolf’s mind was already made up: He may have been a born Bolshoi dancer, but it was the Kirov to which he aspired. “At the Kirov, everything is best, writers, creators.… Bolshoi practically never created anything … everything was simply borrowed.… As a result they had Goleizovsky, they had Lopokhov, and we have Balanchine.”

  On June 19, 1958, Galina Palshina, a “usually very restrained” Kirov fan, wrote in her diary after the students’ graduation performance:

  Stunning impression! First jump in Corsaire strong and soft. Armen’s variation with torches [Khatchaturian’s Gayane] with furious, vertical turns. It must be that tomorrow Nureyev will wake up famous and the whole city will know his name. At the end of the performance he came out excited, happy, embarrassed. His hair was falling over his eyes. He had a suitcase with no handle which was opening all the time and a modest bouquet of flowers in his hands.

  Two or three days later, walking down the corridor, Natalia Dudinskaya, the Kirov’s prima ballerina, saw Rudolf sitting morosely on the stairs. “Rudik—what’s the matter?” she exclaimed. “T
he performance went so well.” The ballerina had been keeping an eye on the student ever since Pushkin had called her into the studio one evening to watch him perform the Diana and Acteon variations, which she herself had danced with Chaboukiani. “I’d been surprised by how that boy, not even in the graduate class, could sense and feel the poses.” However, Rudolf did not confess his dilemma. He had received a letter of “written gratitude” from the administration, and been told that he would be officially accepted in the Kirov at a salary of eighteen hundred rubles a month. But this was as a corps de ballet member, and with the Bolshoi demanding to know if he would be accepting his soloist contract, the time had come for him to make up his mind. Not even Nijinsky had started his Imperial Ballet career as a soloist, but Rudolf had been counting on setting a precedent, bragging to his classmates, “You will see, you will see!” Sitting down beside him, Dudinskaya said, “I hear you’re going to dance in Moscow. Don’t be foolish! Don’t choose the Bolshoi—stay here, and we’ll dance together.”

  The idea, as Rudolf immediately realized, “was fabulous!” Although in the final stage of her career, Dudinskaya and her partner, Konstantin Sergeyev, were regarded as national treasures: “We had the Bronze Horseman, the Hermitage, the Russian Museum—and Dudinskaya and Sergeyev.” Rudolf had worshipped her from the moment he arrived in Leningrad, not only watching all her performances but studying the way she rehearsed other dancers. “That was when I understood that I have to take everything available from all possible teachers.” For the company’s prima ballerina to pick as her new partner a boy straight out of school was as much of an event as when Mathilda Kschessinskaya—star of the Imperial Ballet and onetime mistress of Czar Nicholas—chose the twenty-one-year-old Nijinsky to dance with her. “Sounds like Hollywood story, doesn’t it?” Rudolf later told film director Lindsay Anderson. “I was waiting for something like that to happen.”*

  Also in the audience at the graduation concert, sitting with a pounding heart in case Rudolf burned himself out, was a vivacious young physics student, Liuba Romankova, dancer-slim with large brown eyes, who had been introduced to Rudolf during an intermission by their mutual friend Elizaveta Pazhi. Anxious for her protégé to meet people of his own age outside school, Elizaveta Mikhailovna asked Liuba if she would invite Rudolf for a meal—like many Leningrad families, the Romankovs kept open house on Sundays. “Our cultural life took place at home. But it wasn’t like a salon—it was a kitchen culture with people gathered round a table eating and talking.” A few weeks later, noting the promising omen of an address named after his favorite composer, Rudolf went along to 63 Tchaikovsky Street, a once-grand building with vaulted ceilings, peeling, paneled walls decorated with white Wedgwood-style cupid moldings, and a sweeping wrought-iron staircase. The Romankovs’ second-floor apartment, warmed by floor-to-ceiling wood-burning stoves, was crammed with relatives, three generations of whom were sitting at a large polished table surrounded by books, photographs, and family clutter. Rudolf was immediately made to feel at home. “Our mother and father were superb. They always treated our friends as their own.” At around three in the afternoon lunch was served—typical Sunday fare such as cabbage soup, blinis, cucumbers with dill, garlicky meatballs, boiled potatoes served straight from the saucepan, and sweet Georgian wine.

  When people started getting up from the table at around seven, Liuba and her twin brother, Leonid, also a student at the Polytechnic Institute, invited Rudolf to stay and talk. As attractive as his sister, though much less outgoing, Leonid was tall and gentle, “with a most delicate, refined mind and a generous heart.” (Years later Rudolf confessed to a mutual acquaintance that Leonid was probably his first love, although he hadn’t realized it at the time.) Studying the subject they loved, playing all kinds of sports, and attending the latest exhibitions, films, concerts, and plays, they were the Shestidesyatniki—the children of Khrushchev’s thaw. “It was an intoxicating time for young people in Russia. Our whole lives were ahead of us and the possibilites seemed endless.” Liuba and Leonid found the shy, taciturn Rudolf completely unlike anyone they had ever known. They noticed from the start how he didn’t share their interest in politics—“Not for anything would he allow himself to be drawn into a political debate.… The only world he inhabited was that of the performing arts.”

  That night they talked about literature and the new painting no longer banned from exhibition in Russia—Picasso, the French impressionists, and their favorite artist, the sensuous fauvist Kees van Dongen—chronicler of Rotterdam’s red-light district and the Paris beau monde. Keen anglophiles, then studying English with a private tutor, they immediately infected Rudolf with their enthusiam to learn the language himself. Other passions—jazz being one—were of less interest to him: “He was too immersed in classical music. His world of the arts was that of the nineteenth, not the twentieth century.” Nor did they share his fervor for Dostoyevsky—“not popular with our group”—preferring the new writing they had discovered in the journal Inostrannaya Literatura (foreign literature), such as John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger and work by such Americans as Hemingway, Faulkner, Kerouac, and Steinbeck. They did not stop talking until the early hours of the following day.

  Captivated by these two young people with their fresh perspective on life and learning, Rudolf suddenly saw his own horizon expanding from the narrow ballet world he knew, and as he left the house and walked back to Rossi Street, he felt euphoric.

  He prolonged his sense of well-being on a Crimean holiday at the school dacha, where he kept himself apart from the other students—“We never knew where he was”—and spent his time taking mud baths or lying on the beach. Then calamity struck. Returning to Leningrad, he was summoned to the director’s office and given the following letter.

  To Nureyev Rudolf Hamitovich

  The administration of the Kirov Theater informs you that by the order of the Ministry of Culture of the Soviet Socialist Federation Republic you are being sent to the Ministry of Culture of Bashkirian Soviet Socialist Republic and you should apply there about your future work.

  [signed] Temporary Director I. Glotov

  The Ufa Ballet demanded his return as repayment to the Republic of Bashkir for its grant, and the Kirov administration agreed to let him go. Margarita Alfimova remembers seeing Rudolf running out of the room, “crying and shouting.” Pushkin then arrived to calm him down, and he went back to the rehearsal. “This was the first time I saw him in tears,” said Alla Sizova. “He wept real tears and said, ‘I can’t go back home. I can’t leave the Kirov. I know there is nothing better in ballet than this theater.’ ”

  Glotov had written back to the Bashkirian minister of culture, telling him that Nureyev would be returning “to be at your disposal.” Rudolf, however, had no intention of complying. Almost immediately he caught a plane to Moscow and headed straight to the Ministry of Culture, where he was shown into the office of an assistant bureaucrat who told him that there was nothing to be done. He had to fulfill his duty to the state. But surely, Rudolf argued, an exception should be made when no fewer than three major companies had offered to make him their leading dancer. “I said they were making a big mistake. I was being my own impresario.” There was nothing to be done, the woman repeated implacably. “You’ll be damned!” spat Rudolf as he stormed out of the room (later learning to his satisfaction that the day after their meeting she had been inexplicably dismissed).” I cried on the pavement, and afterward I went to the Bolshoi, and they took me. They said, “Go and collect your belongings and you’ll start working in September.”

  Back in Leningrad, where he began preparing to pack and bid goodbye to his friends, he found a note telling him to go immediately to the company office. There Boris Fenster, the Kirov’s chief choreographer and artistic director, a kindly, avuncular man in his early forties, astonished him by saying wryly, “Why are you making such a fool of yourself? Unpack your things and stay here with us.” Pushkin had successfully petitioned on Rudolf’s behalf. He wou
ld not only be joining the company as a soloist but making his debut in a principal role by partnering Dudinskaya in Laurentia in November 1958.

  Since graduating, Rudolf had been living in a workers’ hostel, sleeping in a room with seven others, on bunk beds nailed to the wall like shelves. Now, however, he heard that the theater would be allocating him a room of his own in an apartment in Ordinarnaya Street in the Petrograd quarter, a quiet, prestigious part of town. Such luxury was a dream to most Leningraders accustomed to communal living, but learning that he was expected to share the apartment with Alla Sizova, Rudolf was furious. Confronting Ninel Kurgapkina, one of his favorite ballerinas, he exclaimed, “Have you heard? They’re giving me a flat! With Sizova! They think by doing so I’ll eventually marry her! Never!!!”

  Although so ideal together onstage, friends claim that they “hated each other in life,” Rudolf once going so far as dismissing Sizova as “just a Yivreka [a Jewess]!” a remark that was not only crass but untrue.* Most of his antagonism was rooted in lack of respect for her as a performer; he found her emotionally cold and felt that she was complaisant about her natural talent.† In the end, neither dancer moved into the apartment. Rudolf preferred to stay in his “cupboard,” which was near the theater—Ordinarnaya Street was a forty-minute bus ride from the center—and where he did not have to arrange daily chores like washing, cleaning, cooking, shopping; Sizova continued to live with Natalia Kamkova, her teacher, while her parents moved into her room. Rosa Nureyeva, who was longing for the chance to join her brother in Leningrad, soon arrived to take over Rudolf’s.

  Most of November was spent preparing Laurentia, which Chaboukiani, inspired by Dudinskaya’s virtuoso brilliance, had made especially for her. A Spanish tale with a suitably Soviet message, the ballet tells of a heroine and her fiancé who lead a peasant uprising against a despotic commandore. In it Chaboukiani created a new idiom for the male dancer, giving it emotional power by blending bravura classical dancing with folk elements that he had imported from his native Georgia. This was exactly the fusion that Rudolf had already been exploring in character classes at school.